Movie Reviews
‘The Strangers — Chapter 3’ Review: The Best Film in the Reboot Trilogy Is Still Bad
I’ve been watching Renny Harlin’s three-film reboot of “The Strangers” for several years, because that’s how it was foisted upon us, and now that it’s finally over, I’m willing to give it some credit. It was an ambitious idea to turn a classic home invasion thriller into a gigantic pre-planned slasher trilogy. The filmmakers could have phoned the whole thing in and nobody would have blamed them. Heck, given how it all turned out, phoning it in might have been the better plan. But instead they tried something and they deserve an “A” for effort. And a “D” for everything else.
If you’re just now joining us, the original “The Strangers” was an efficient, tightly-edited home invasion thriller about a young couple attacked by three masked murderers. Why? Because they were home. The ambiguity was the point. It was a horror movie where the horror could happen to anyone, for any reason, at any time, and it was scary as hell. There was an excellent sequel called “The Strangers: Prey at Night,” but when that didn’t set the box office on fire, the studio rebooted the franchise with an inefficient, extremely padded trilogy that revealed everything about the killers and ruined their mystique. They say “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it,” and they didn’t. They just broke it, seemingly on purpose.
Madelaine Petsch stars as Maya. She was attacked in “Chapter 1,” she ran from the killers in “Chapter 2,” and it sounds like there should be more to her story after two films but there really isn’t. When we catch up to Maya in “The Strangers — Chapter 3” she’s celebrating her first proper victory, having finally killed Pin-Up Girl, one of the three title murderers (she wore the “Pin-Up Girl” mask, try to keep up). Unfortunately for Maya, the leader of the slasher cabal had a romantic thing going with Pin-Up Girl, so now Scarecrow (the one in the scarecrow mask) has weird desires for Maya. He doesn’t want to kill her anymore. He wants her to be the new Pin-Up Girl, which means he has to turn her into a serial killer and make her fall in love with him.
That’s a creepy idea. Horror protagonists have been losing their sanity since the dawn of the genre, and several slasher series already tried to get away with a seemingly stalwart hero turning to the dark side, or at least feeling tempted. “Halloween” tried it a couple times. The “Scream” movies feinted in that direction. Heck, “Saw” made it their whole gimmick after a while. The trick is to put the hero through so much hell that hell becomes their new normal. When their sense of identity shatters they could glom onto anything, even evil, just to make sense of it all. I’m not sure that’s good psychology but it’s an unsettling notion, at any rate.
But if that story was going to work we’d have to believe it, and that’s where “The Strangers — Chapter 3” falls flat. Madelaine Petsch barely had a character to play in the first place, and three films later there’s still very little evidence that she’s playing a real human being. Heck, it was hard to believe she was even scared until the second film. It doesn’t help that everyone else in the cast plays arch, unconvincing archetypes, and it really doesn’t help that the villains’ backstories are perfunctory and shallow.
You can’t shatter the audience’s reality, let alone the hero’s, without establishing reality in the first place, and Harlin’s trilogy is too phony to qualify. A character-driven storyline only works if the characters have character, and a plot-driven storyline doesn’t work if you can’t sell the plot. There’s a scene in “The Strangers — Chapter 3” where Scarecrow finally takes his mask off and an audience member gasped, as if it was a big reveal. But there was already a whole, long scene earlier in the movie where that guy talked about being the killer. The scene had such vague dialogue and monotonous acting and generic filmmaking that the plot point didn’t register the first time.
In my review of “The Strangers — Chapter 1” I talked about how the original film’s title referred not just to the murderers, but also the protagonists, who thought they knew each other but didn’t. (In my review of “Chapter 2” I talked about food poisoning. These movies really wore me down.) As we finally, finally put this whole whoopsie-daisy to bed I find myself wondering who “The Strangers” really were in this reboot trilogy. They can’t be the masked killers. We got to know them too well. And “The Strangers” can’t be the victims, because the victims aren’t complicated enough to be unknowable.
So I’m forced to conclude, in the end, that the strangers in Renny Harlin’s “The Strangers” are the people who thought this was a good idea. They watched one of the scariest movies of the 21st century, made an itemized list of everything that made it work, then ignored those lessons. It’s genuinely hard to fathom. They didn’t even go in a wild new direction. They just tried to do the same schtick, but longer and worse, and let’s face it, “longer and worse” is only the goal if you’re trying to torture somebody.
Wait, was that the point this whole time? Was this supposed to be torture? Mission accomplished, I guess. What a strange mission.
Movie Reviews
1986 Movie Reviews – Dangerously Close, Fire with Fire, Last Resort, and Short Circuit | The Nerdy
by | May 9, 2026May 9, 2026 10:30 am EDT
Welcome to an exciting year-long project here at The Nerdy. 1986 was an exciting year for films giving us a lot of films that would go on to be beloved favorites and cult classics. It was also the start to a major shift in cultural and societal norms, and some of those still reverberate to this day.
We’re going to pick and choose which movies we hit, but right now the list stands at nearly four dozen.
Yes, we’re insane, but 1986 was that great of a year for film.
The articles will come out – in most cases – on the same day the films hit theaters in 1986 so that it is their true 40th anniversary. All films are also watched again for the purposes of these reviews and are not being done from memory. In some cases, it truly will be the first time we’ve seen them.
This time around, it’s May 9, 1986, and we’re off to see Dangerously Close, Fire with Fire, Last Resort, and Short Circuit.
Dangerously Close
I would love to tell you what the point of this film was, but I’m not sure it knew.
An elite school has turned into a magnet school, attracting some “undesirables,” so a group of students known as The Sentinels take up policing their school, but will they go too far?
The basic plot of the film is simple enough, but there is an oddball “twist” toward the end tht served no real purpose and somehow turns the whole thing into a murder-mystery. Mysteries only work when you know you’re supposed to be solving them, and not when you’re alerted to one existing with 15 minutes left.
Decent 80s music, some stylistic shots, absolutely no substance.
Fire with Fire
Oh wait… I may want to go back and watch Dangerously Close again over this one.
Joe Fisk (Craig Sheffer) is being held at a juvenile delinquent facility close a high-end all-girls Catholic school. One day while running through the forest as part of an exercise he spots Catholic schoolgirl Lisa Taylor (Virginia Madsen) and the two fall immediately in love because… reasons.
This film is just so incredibly lazy. The ‘love story’ really can just be chalked up to ‘hormones.’
Last Resort
Once again I am baffled how Charles Grodin kept getting work so much through out the 1980s.
George Lollar (Grodin) is a salesman in Chicago in need of a vacation. He loads up the family and takes them to Club Sand, which turns out to be a swingers resort as well as surrounded by barbed wire to keep rebels out.
There are a lot of talented people in this movie such as Phil Hartman and Megan Mullally, but the film lets them down at every turn with half-baked ideas of jokes. Supposedly, Grodin rewrote nearly the entire script and I think that explains a lot about how this film feels like unfinished ideas. It’s a Frankenstein monster of a script with half-complete ideas that feel like they are from completely different movies.
Short Circuit
Lets just get this out of the way: What in the world was Fisher Stevens doing?
NOVA Laboratory has come up with a new series of military robots called S.A.I.N.T. (Strategic Artificially Intelligent Nuclear Transport). Following a successful demonstration for the military, Five is struck by an electrical surge and finds itself needing ‘input.’ After inadvertently escaping the lab, it wands into the life of Stephanie Speck (Ally Sheedy), who cares for animals and takes Five in. Dr. Newton Crosby (Steve Guttenberg) is trying to get five back, while the security team wants to destroy it.
Overall, the film is thin, but harmless. The 80s did seem to love a ‘technology being used for the wrong reasons’ theme, and this falls into that camp. What is mind-blowing, however, is Stevens as Ben Jabituya, Crosby’s assistant. Not only is he wearing brown face, but he’s doing a horrible Indian accent and later reveals he was born and raised in the U.S.
His whole character is mystifying.
Honestly, a couple of decades ago I may have recommended this movie, but it’s a definite pass now just for being offensive.
1986 Movie Reviews will continue on May 16, 2026, with Sweet Liberty and Top Gun.
By ABBIE BERNSTEIN / Staff Writer
Posted: May 8th, 2026 / 08:34 PM
AFFECTION movie poster | ©2026 Brainstorm Media
Rating: Not Rated
Stars: Jessica Rothe, Joseph Cross, Julianna Layne
Writer: BT Meza
Director: BT Meza
Distributor: Brainstorm Media
Release Date: May 8, 2026
AFFECTION is an odd title for this tale. While it is about a number of topics and emotions, fondness isn’t one of them. Obsession, definitely. Love, possibly. The kind of general warm fellow feelings associated with “affection”? No.
There have been a lot of movies lately in which characters – mostly women – are grappling with false identities and/or false memories imposed upon them, mostly by men.
Let us stipulate that the protagonist (Jessica Rothe) in AFFECTION is not an android or in an artificial reality. However, we can tell something is way off from the opening sequence. A car is stalled on a tree-bordered highway. Rothe’s character is lying face down on the asphalt beside it, possibly dead.
But then the young woman rises, dragging a broken ankle. She experiences a full-body seizure. Fighting to recover, she sees oncoming headlights and tries to run, only to be hit by a car.
The woman wakes up in a bed she doesn’t recognize, next to a man (Joseph Cross) she likewise is sure she’s never seen before. One big confrontation later, the man says his name is Bruce – and that the woman is his wife, Ellie.
Ellie insists that her name is Sarah Thompson, and she is married to someone else, with a son. When she sees her reflection in a mirror, she doesn’t relate to the face looking back at her.
Bruce counters that Ellie has a rare neurological condition that causes her to block out her waking life and believe her dreams are real. This is why they agreed, together, to move to this isolated house, without the kinds of interruptions that can hinder Ellie’s recovery.
The set-up is presented in a way where we share Ellie’s skepticism. But Ellie and Bruce’s little daughter Alice (Julianna Layne) immediately identifies Ellie as “Mommy!” Alice appears to be too young to be in on any kind of deception, so what is going on here?
AFFECTION eventually explains this via a helpful videotape, though it’s so convoluted that viewers watching on streaming may want to replay the sequence to make sure they understand the exposition.
Writer/director BT Meza musters a sense of menace and lurking weirdness, as well as making great use of his location.
We still have a lot of questions, many of which are still unanswered by the film’s end. It may not matter to the points AFFECTION is trying to make, but a better sense of exactly how all this started might help our investment.
As it is, despite a heroically versatile performance by Rothe, a credible and anguished turn by Cross and appealing work from Layne, we’re so busy trying to piece together what’s important and what’s not and how we’re supposed to feel about all of it that it can be hard to keep track of the action as it unfolds.
Agree or not, Meza’s arguments are lucid and illustrated clearly by AFFECTION’s events. However, the movie is structured in a way that becomes more frustrating as it goes. We comprehend it intellectually but can’t engage viscerally.
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RICHMOND, Va. (WRIC) — In this episode of 8News Reel Talk, digital producer Julia Broberg is joined by anchor Deanna Allbrittin and reporter Allison Williams to talk about “The Devil Wears Prada 2.”
The hosts gave their reviews and assigned the following star ratings:
Deanna: ★★★★.5
Allison: ★★★.25
Julia: ★★
To watch more livestreams and digital video content, head to the WRIC+ Originals page. You can also watch full on-demand videos on your smart TV using the WRIC+ app.
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